A & M: My wedding invite

No pressure then!

This was for my own wedding so reputation and relationship were on the line.

Like a lot of designers I find designing for myself particularly difficult. So when it came to creating the invites and other material for my own wedding, the pressure was definitely on! Neither my wife or myself are Asian, but we were planning to honeymoon in India, having Indian food, pink and orange colour scheme, Bollywood dancers and Asian style marquee so at least the theme had been set.

The colour scheme was awesome, but also very strong and potentially overbearing. It was important that the invitation represented both of us in a balanced fashion so I immediately decided that orange should be male, pink female. The objective was a balance between bright, vibrant and fun, but also sophisticated and romantic. To achieve this dark brown and elegant illustration work was used on the outside. Typography was reduced to a simple symbol based on our initials. From this we have since developed a new font available on the fonts page.

On the inside you have a sudden blast of colour and the fun side with the stylised cartoons of us. To achieve the vibrancy cmyk would not cut it in the orange, so three spots (421, 021, rhod red) were used. In addition a matt lam and new digital gloss emboss for the front - big thanks to RCS printing www.rcs.plc.uk - was implemented. Final result was cool. We had to print a minimum of 250, so with the remainder we created the rest of the material required such as gift tags, order of the day etc.

To keep the copy to a minimum and avoid inclusion of additional paper/info, we developed a simple website.

Thanks to the project planning skills of my wife the day went ahead without a hitch and a great time was had by all.